Construction of the Artificial Proteins Whose Functions Can Be Altered with the Specific External Inputs by Using the Engineered Protein Modules

Abstract

The artificial proteins, whose functions can be altered with the specific external inputs (pH, metal ions, ligands, etc.), would have large applications, for ligand-specific sensor-proteins, site-selective protein-drugs, tools to examine natural protein functions, and so on. Here we supply one of the methodologies to design such artificial proteins, especially from the protein engineering background. We designed the de novo coiled-coil proteins whose tertiary structures are altered from random coil to bundled structure by the specific external input. By insertion of the coiled-coil proteins into target natural proteins, we succeeded to construct the peptide-ligand-dependent RNA hydrolysis enzyme and metal-ion-dependent green fluorescent protein.